My White Privilege

Socialist breadline in Romania

Photo: Wikipedia Commons

I pulled the thick blanket out the dryer – it was still a tad damp so I placed it on the banister. I don’t have a clothesline – they are not allowed by the socialist Homeowners Association (HOA). If you want to live relatively close to a job, you must build in an HOA, you don’t have the luxury of declining it.

I fail to understand how the presence of a clothesline in the back of my house would devalue the property. But HOA finds it acceptable that seven families rent one house and take up the parking on the entire street where it becomes a gauntlet trying to dodge all cars. But I digress.

I am grateful that I have a dryer and a vacuum cleaner. In my previous “lily-white” communist world, it would have been an economic privilege - not a privilege as in the ridiculous liberal construct “white privilege,” but a privilege of life’s conveniences only reserved for the commies in power.  

I am white, I was told recently, by a huffy Millennial who happened to be white as well, therefore I benefitted my entire life of “white privilege.” Perhaps I should dig deeper to find and examine these “white privileges” I did not realize I had.

I had the privilege to work hard in school and get my education before the age of 29. When I had babies, I raised them, I did not let daddy government do the parental job for me. I worked at least two jobs my entire adult life in order to raise two children by myself and take care of my mom.

I did not go to bars, I did not get tattoos, I did not go to salons to do my hair or my nails in the most ridiculous colors and shapes, I did not drink, I did not own fancy cars or many cars in my life. I drive today a 14-year old car.

But I see and hear all these people accusing me of “white privilege” while they drive brand new Mercedes, BMWs, Lexus, Tesla, and other luxurious vehicles. But I am not complaining that they have economic privilege. If they want to spend the money to own the latest, that is capitalism and I rejoice in its existence.

If anybody has ever set foot in a socialist country run by the Communist Party perhaps realized that nobody had any kind of special privilege except the ruling class and the oligarchy. Nobody owned a home, a car, or any luxuries.

Our daily existence involved standing in food lines much longer than Americans are now inconvenienced in grocery stores while practicing “social distancing” in order to get their food, toilet paper, and other necessities. The total disruption of an economy by an unseen Chinese flu virus is hard on its entitled population that seldom experienced pain and adversity. They soon start fighting with each other over toilet paper, bread, and milk in order to survive.

Deliveries came once a day, but it was never enough of anything or it only came in one variety because the economy was centrally run by the Politburo and all they cared about was that their bellies were full, they had luxurious homes, and a chauffeur driving them around in a car they never bought or earned. If I did not have a conscience, I could have lived that life too.

In the meantime, the “white-privileged” proletariat class made do with grocery store scraps, if they could find them at the end of the long line, and tiny living in concrete apartments which seldom had running water, hot water, or heat in winter.

Our “white privilege,” and we were all white, did not involve vacations in private dachas at the Black Sea, ski trips in the Carpathian Mountains, and overseas vacations paid by the benevolent dictator who rewarded his henchmen quite well.

I was lucky to escape this socialist paradise and I came to the U.S. There was no “white privilege” waiting for me. I had to get a minimum wage job for $3.10 an hour and watched in sadness as people way less qualified and educated than I was get jobs I had applied for. They got them because they did not have my “white privilege.”  

In college, worse students than I were given special benefits, scholarships and free college tuition based on their skin color and ethnicity. I worked hard to make good grades but when I tried to get a college job to supplement my meager “white privilege” income, non-whites were always hired because their ancestors were slaves. My ancestors were slaves too, to the Ottoman Empire, but I don’t think Turkey would be amenable today to pay us reparations for all the enslavement they put my people through for 500 plus years.

When I was hungry, my “white privilege” did not feed me, there were no welfare cards and grocery store willing to fill my cart with everything at the taxpayers’ expense.

Privileged as you say we were in our squalid poverty, we did not own electronics, a fridge, a vacuum cleaner, a tv, appliances to make cooking easier, computers, smart phones, or even old style landline phones for that matter.

If we did not work, the socialists did not give us anything except slogans and parades for the Dear Leader. They did not feed our children in school three meals a day. If you did not work, you did not eat. That was our “white privilege,” the privilege to work hard in order to survive.

You complain that we have “white privilege?” How about the privileges you have that we work hard to pay for every day? Unlike shrill complainers, we don’t have free Medicaid, welfare, or the luxury to stay home and have more babies because daddy government pays for their birth and their care.

Next time you accuse us of having “white privilege,” be careful how you word this nonsensical liberal construct because we are not buying the rhetorical racism coming from the left anymore. You’ve cried wolf too many times.

Scientific Nutrition, Food Lines, Excess, and Worms

Photo: Compliments of DeWitt E.

It is inconceivable for those born after 1989, who never experienced want of anything, that at one time, the proletariat of the communist dear leader Ceausescu had to survive on a decreed daily rations of food and to stand in line from the middle of the night until stores opened and people fought for the food delivered in the morning.

Standing in food lines had become a method of survival and a national sport. Families involved their children, as young as five, to stand in lines to keep the place for a relative waiting in another line, always carrying an expanding string shopping bag reminiscent of a fishing net and extra cash.

Experiencing shortages of food because of war is something that even developed nations had to endure willingly to make sure that nutrition was available to all. For example, during WWII, there was a ration card issued to shoppers. The reason was obvious, the men were fighting a war and there were less people engaged in the economy to produce enough supply to satisfy demand while more resources were going to the war machine.

But the shortage of food people experienced for decades under Nicolae Ceausescu had to do with his ambitious communist plan to develop the heavy industry, no matter how unprofitable, and to pay off the debt to the west at the expense of the standard of living of the population.

The Communist Party had developed norms of “rational nutrition” based on medical criteria of age, gender, profession, physical condition, and energy expended on the job since the 1964. In case you wonder why they would embark on such endeavor, it was because communists do not leave anything to chance, everything you do must be controlled and enforced by law.

As shortages became more pronounced in the 1980s, the Communist Party issued new legal guidelines for nutrition. A huge control apparatus of propaganda was put into motion: doctors, college professors, the health ministry, the agriculture ministry, nutritional specialists, the communist press, the labor unions, and other political organizations sanctioned by the Communist Party. The declared official scope was to improve the population’s health. But the reality had all to do with the financial situation at the time. The economy was suffocated by Ceausescu’s ambition to pay off western debt and by his very expensive megalomaniacal projects to glorify him and his communist rule. He was, after all, the “maverick.”

A specialized commission proposed by the Health Minister in 1976 took its sweet time to develop norms of “rational nutrition.” It was not officially approved by the Communist Party’s “The Great National Gathering” until 1984. This “rational” program of nutrition led to a general suffering of the entire population unlike any other before.

People were starved but did not have to eat grass, leather, or engage in cannibalism as was the case in Ukraine. The man-made famine in Holodomor (Ukrainian for ‘murder by hunger’) happened in 1932-1933 when 28,000 people a day died of starvation. Stalin’s Soviet regime had taught Ukrainian farmers a lesson they never forgot. http://holodomorct.org/

An article in “Financial Times” of October 25, 1984, mentions that “Romania surprised its skeptical creditors by paying off a debt of $1.5 billion in the first 9 months of the year.” The same article mentions the fact that the payoff was achieved at the expense of the deplorable standard of living of the population, as evidenced by “the sad lines in front of all stores.”

Speaking about Romania paying its debt off ahead of schedule, Washington Post quoted Sen. Dennis DeConcini (D-Arizona) in April 1989: "Fuel and electricity have been rationed for years. Staple foods, including milk, bread and flour, are rationed, and in many localities even these are unavailable. Meat is a rarity; soup bones only occasionally appear in stores. Decades of financial mis-planning and inefficient industrial development have led to the dire condition of the Romanian economy, making it the poorest in Europe after Albania." https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1989/04/14/debts-paid-romania-says/89557c5f-9f4d-4810-8e15-91538f134a3f/?utm_term=.c580cd34e479

The communist party leaders concealed the draconian rationing of food to pay off its debt by implementing the “scientific program of feeding the proletariat.”

The severe food shortages gave rise to black markets and hoarding, even though having excess food was punishable with jail time. People also bartered food and services to survive. Food lines became an economic input and the “entire social life developed around the obsession of finding food.” The terms “malnutrition” and “starvation” were replaced by the euphemistic concept of “rational nutrition.” http://www.istorie-pe-scurt.ro/cum-arata-o-cartela-pe-vremea-lui-ceausescu-programul-de-alimentatie-rationala/

An American who lived in Romania in 1983-1986 attested to the many horrors of Ceausescu’s reign of terror called the Golden Epoch. Speaking of food rationing and long-term malnutrition, she said, “I regularly saw people stand in line all day to buy a Styrofoam cup with a few broken eggs in it.  Unrefrigerated raw milk was sold on street corners on hot summer days.”

She continued, “Romania was rich in oil but Ceausescu shut down the urban heating grids [villagers burned wood for heat and there was no running water or indoor plumbing] in the middle of winter so that he could export the oil to the west for hard currency.  The very young and the very old dropped like flies.  We had no heat, no hot water and no cooking gas for 5 months out of the year.  We actually saw miles long gas lines right next to oil refineries.”

Joe Keller, an attaché to the American Embassy in the mid-80s, told another interesting story about food. He had picked up two bags of cherries from a street vendor at the airport. He was having friends over that evening to watch a movie. One of the children went into the kitchen to get a glass of water and came back horrified, telling her parents that there were worms in the kitchen. Sure enough, the table was covered in fruit flies’ worms. Some had crawled out of the cherries they had all consumed in the dark while watching the movie.

I don’t think I had ever eaten fruits in my childhood that did not have fruit flies’ worms. It was extra protein. Years later I wrote a story about that called Wormy Banana. https://ileanawrites.blogspot.com/2012/06/wormy-banana.html

Unscientific and chaotic means of running the socialist economy gave rise to decades of misery caused entirely by the communist dictatorship with its “golden” dear leader Ceausescu and his wife Elena.

The arbitrary and forced industrialization of Romania under his reign of terror gave rise to industrial giants which produced goods inefficiently, with massive energy consumption, massive raw material use, and high costs at the expense of the destitute people. Food and water were always rationed and in short supply and electricity and thermal energy were delivered arbitrarily on the whims of the apparatchiks in charge.

Nobody dared to object as the communist ideology ruled supreme. This perverse philosophy intended to shape the “new man,” a human being willing to enthusiastically approve and cheer the dictator’s random and destructive political and economic decisions.

Copying North Korea and China, Ceausescu developed his cult of personality. Millions were required to idolize and sing praises to the dear leader and his wife. Revisionist history placed him and his wife in the hall of revolutionaries, turning them into “the mother and father of the country.” Ceausescu, with just an elementary education, became the Honorary President of the Academy. https://istoriiregasite.wordpress.com/2012/06/16/romania-in-timpul-regimului-ceausescu/

While malnourished proletarians lived in Spartan conditions, barely heated concrete block apartments often without hot water and even cold water, the dear leader was chauffeured to different residences and his family luxuriated in the “Spring Palace” in Bucharest, built in the mid-60s.  This permanent family residence was decorated with one of a kind gold leaf mosaics, indoor and outdoor swimming pools, mahogany, rose, and teakwood furniture, hand-made brocaded draperies and tapestries, an extensive collection of original paintings and sculptures by famous Romanian artists, a trophy room, a wine cellar, and a bunker. There was Limoges, Baccarat, Mainz and other expensive porcelains and crystals. The 5,000 square meters residence had 170 rooms spread on two levels and a basement (88 rooms). His Swiss bank account was flush with millions of dollars. https://www.punctul.ro/in-vizita-la-fosta-resedinta-a-familiei-nicolae-ceausescu/

While the proletariat stood in food lines, subjected to “scientific nutrition,” the communists engaged in obscene excesses.

Cooking Was Not Fun Because It Was Survival

Mamaliga with sourcream

People have asked me why I never really enjoyed gourmet cooking nor was I interested in developing such talents beyond feeding my family an inexpensive meal. As a woman, mother, and wife, that is anathema to a failed human being. How can you not be interested in providing the most delicious, appealing, and nutritious meals for your family?

To understand where I come from, you must walk in the shoes of women and children under the communist regime where I grew up, women with children in tow who had to stand in line every day at an early age if they wanted to buy bread and basics. Moms sent their children to stand in the bread and milk lines, and they stood in the meat and fresh vegetable lines and canned veggies in winter. Fresh was a stretch even in summer time, we had to contend with wilted seasonal spinach, green beans, and peas and shriveled potatoes and apples. Meat meant choice cuts of fat attached to bones with which mom used to make soup. Refrigerators were rare and expensive and freezers did not exist for us, window sills doubled as such in winter time. Crows loved our storage system.

We ate well when grandpa dropped by and brought us a chicken, a pat of butter, and a quarter of a gallon of milk from his country “farm” where he raised rabbits, chicken, a sheep, a pig, and a cow. His farm consisted of a small barn and enough land to have a garden and space to grow some rows of corn.

The communist cooperative grew wheat and the crop was split among the villagers who toiled in the fields each day after the communist party received its demanded quota. It was almost like paying the mafia. After the communist party (the mafia) confiscated their lands for “the good of the people,” these former landowners had to work the land, put in the crop, harvest it, really backbreaking manual labor, and then pay the lion’s share to the land confiscator, the communist party. What a deal!

How can anyone be interested in fancy cooking when ingredients were impossible to find, when we lived from day to day on most basic foodstuff after we stood in endless lines daily?

Can spoiled Americans understand how it feels to enter a grocery store and see rows after rows of empty shelves? Can they imagine real lines for food extending sometimes for a mile, winding around the block and the entire neighborhood?

Can they imagine the fist and tug-of-war battles for a merchandise deal they see on Black Friday magnified to the point of exhaustion? If fat Americans give each other black eyes and bruises over a television set, an electronic game, or other silly gadget in order to save a few bucks while claiming that they are exploited, marginalized, poor, and downtrodden by non-existent “white privilege,” how would they react when faced with severe shortages of food and water? Unbelievably, the next day after they give thanks for what they already have, they pull each other’s hair out fighting for a TV that was probably cheaper a few days earlier.

Normally people fought for the five salamis hanging in the deli window, or a hundred bottles of cooking oil, or a few pallets of sugar and flour, that day’s delivery to the store. Even with rationing coupons, there was never enough food or necessities because planning was centralized, not based on free market supply and demand, it was based on five-year plans crafted and decided by uneducated communist bureaucrats who had no idea what they were doing nor did they care as long as they had their own grocery stores, department stores, doctors, clinics, pharmacies, and hospitals.

It was a privilege to find some food with shorter lines around Christmas time when the communist government supplied more pallets to grocery stores in order to pacify the stupid masses and to continue the real exploitation of the proletariat by the elites who pretended to be taking care of them, to be shielding them from the “evil” capitalists.

We were thin from lack of food, but we were not healthy. Pharmacy shelves were empty too, even vitamins and cotton balls were hard to find. There was a thriving black market at ten times the price that most people could not afford on the government-dictated meager salaries. Equality was painful, miserable, and stomach growling and churning.

I am hearing this tune again from bratty liberal kids who demand social justice and equality.  P.J. O’Rourke called them “spoiled, miserable, unsatisfied, demanding, ill-disciplined, despotic, and useless.” Somehow, in an alternate universe, these “sniveling brats” blame capitalism for the generational welfare that fat and comparatively well-off Americans accept and demand from the Democrat Party that keeps them “poor.” Personal responsibility is an alien concept to most who are accustomed to being taken care off by taxpayers’ generosity.

Poverty is a relative term and most people ill-define or misunderstand poverty. According to the World Bank, almost 600 million citizens of the globe make less than $2 a day. Are you poor compared to them?

When people tell me how rewarding it is to cook fancy meals for their families, I just see spoiled individuals who have so much to be thankful for but have no idea how lucky they are to be given so many choices by a free market system promoted by capitalism, not by the socialist egalitarian non-sense.  

Americans don’t understand the concept of the starving goose of socialism who was kept pacified and faithful by feeding her one kernel a day, just enough to prevent starvation. This way, she always knew who her masters were and was kept under control, no leash necessary, just a barbed wired fence to keep geese from escaping.

 

Food Lines Coming?

Food line in Venezuela
Photo: Wikipedia

Americans willingly stand in line for hours waiting for a store to open during Black Friday or to purchase tickets to a sought-after football game or concert.  They don’t mind freezing in the cold, sleeping in a tent on the side-walk hours and days before the store opens – they want to save $50 for a television set, find a toy that everybody else wants for Christmas, a popular electronic gadget, first issues of geek gear, or tickets to a favorite concert.

What if Americans had to get up early in the morning every day and run around numerous stores in town in order to find food, basic staples, and gas? Ask anybody this question and they will roll their eyes because, in their lifetime they’ve never had to suffer shortages of anything, they only remember abundance in the land of plenty.

Could that ever change? Of course not, most Americans would say. I and my fellow survivors of communism know better because we stood in such lines, I call them the lines of survival. We suffered the indignity of having to do without food, even after standing in lines with thousands of other people, only to find out that the supply ran out, or eating spoiled food that had to be boiled again in order to destroy the bacteria and make it edible.

This is what happens when a previously successful free market society is turned upside down by the socialist ideology utopia -- the free market collapses and is replaced by an inadequate and inept government control of the economy which results in serious disruptions to planning, production, and delivery of goods and services. The economy is no longer driven by supply and demand but by the central planning of government socialist bureaucrats who fill their coffers first and ignore the needs of the population at large while making grandiose speeches about how much they are helping the poor.

Most recent case in point is Venezuela. Hugo Chavez destroyed a formerly prosperous nation with his social justice drivel. He brought the Castro-style clinics to Venezuela and destroyed the country’s healthcare.  He disrupted the food production and supply. Now that the oil revenues are down due to collapsing oil prices, the country is really suffering. Foreign currency is in short supply, inflation was 64 percent in November, and imports caused shortages of toilet paper, detergent, and car batteries.

According to Andrew Rosati and Noris Soto, the food shortages are so serious that the food distribution was placed under military protection. Thousands of people lined up for blocks, trying to find chicken, toilet paper, and detergent. Price controls imposed by government will guarantee that the lines and shortages will continue. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2015-01-09/venezuelans-throng-grocery-stores-on-military-protection-order.html

Americans have had their experience with price controls at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, and it did not end so well. Washington’s army almost starved to death. Farmers sold their produce to the British for gold instead of feeding the continental army for a measly price that did not cover their costs and survival of their families.

Dealing with a serious economic crisis in a socialist manner, the Interior Minister, Carmen Melendez, sent “security forces to food stores and distribution centers to protect shoppers.” While stores after stores show empty shelves and security does not allow photographs, rationing forces citizens to fight over whatever is available for sale, jumping the line and starting fist fights, shoving, and hair pulling incidents. Bloomberg reports that one shopper looked for diapers for 15 days. “People are so desperate they’re sleeping in the lines,” a shopper was quoted.

Because President Nicolas Maduro promised to tweak by decree the government-controlled exchange rate system set at 6.3 bolivars per U.S. dollar, companies fear devaluation and are not sure if they’ll have enough resources to restock inventories or even find inputs needed.  Meanwhile the black market is booming with an exchange rate of 187 bolivars per dollar.

The country was in bad economic shape previously due to years of Chavez’s mismanagement of the economy but at least they had good oil revenues which accounted for 95 percent of Venezuela’s exports. With oil prices dropping so low in recent months, revenues from oil exports were cut drastically.